Mass Combat: Failing Strategy Roll with a bigger Margin of Success than the Winner

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by hal

By definition, any roll that is 10 higher than your skill/attribute being rolled against is deemed to be a crit failure. An 18 is always a crit failure, so you may wish to equate the two in a quick contest. That is to say, a 17 becomes a normal failure if your skill is 17+, with an 18 being a miss by 10.

This is not stated as such in the rules, so take it for what it is worth.

One house rule that I use is that there are no crits in a contest. Keeps it simple as it were.

Houserule, heh?

Originally Posted by Kromm

As the rules state, the winner of a Quick Contest is the contestant with the greatest margin of success or smallest margin of failure. The rules don't mention critical results because they're not relevant to the calculation of a margin.

Consider a Quick Contest where Character A has skill 14, rolls a 4, succeeds by 10, and scores a critical success, while Character B has skill 30, rolls a 10, succeeds by 20, but scores only a regular success. Character A loses to Character B, and in fact Character B gets a 10-point margin of victory. It might seem to "cheapen" Character A's critical success to say that Character B wins, but all Player A did was roll dice well. It would cheapen Character B's massive investment in her abilities even more to let Character A win with a critical succes. After all, Player B actually paid points -- she bought another 16 levels, which might be 64 points in a skill, 80 points in Will or Per, 160 points in ST or HT, 320 points in DX or IQ, or some combination thereof. To put it in perspective, Player A could "buy" a critical success for at most 5 points (see the box on p. B347)!

Some rules do specifically note what critical success and failure do in a Quick Contest if you win or if you lose. However, actual victory and defeat depend on the margins. This is for the sake of fairness. Points, not lucky die rolls, are the gold standard in GURPS. If we're going to start letting lucky dice trump points, then we might as well have people roll up attributes instead of pay points for them . . .